The football coach admitted he had hugged and kissed the team's 17-year-old manager and bought her flowers, a championship ring and a jacket.

Spray's conduct led then-Superintendent Steve Chestnut to conclude that the coach "has engaged in an inappropriate and exploitive relationship with a female high-school student," according to Chestnut's 1996 complaint to the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI.) "My investigation revealed an inappropriate romantic-type of relationship."

Chestnut gave the OSPI the district's file on its investigation, including interviews with Spray, the girl and witnesses.

For three years, the OSPI did little with the complaint, records show. In 1999, it dismissed the complaint without explanation.

Before that, the district reached an agreement with Spray: Instead of firing him, it paid him $15,000 in 1996 to quit "based on what was best for the school district," Chestnut said.

A love note the football coach wrote to a seventh-grade girl was so alarming that Principal Pam Galloway immediately removed him from the classroom.

"It is so frustrating to see you and not be able to show how much I love you," Morrison wrote to the 13-year-old in January 2000.

The OSPI investigated him, obtaining statements from school officials over the next several months.

"I now have no doubt in my mind that Joe Morrison was grooming youngsters," Galloway stated. "He seemed to focus on several girls and to keep them vying for his attention.

"He lacks the good moral character" to be a teacher.

The file contains few entries after that. In March 2002, the state dismissed the case when Morrison's teaching license expired. The OSPI never decided whether he was fit to teach.

He can apply for a new license in Washington or elsewhere.

The girl, now in high school, said he should have been barred from teaching. "If he goes back to teaching and there's another girl that he starts writing letters to and then it turns out to be more, then she gets hurt in a bigger way," she said.